368 ON GENERATION. 



of love to secure the perpetuity of their kinds. Or (and it is 

 thus that we have it in the mythology) it is as if the genital 

 organs of Saturn, cast into the sea at this season, raised a foam, 

 whence sprung Aphrodite. For, in the generation of animals, 

 as the poet says, " superat tener omnibus humor/' a gentle 

 moisture all pervades, and the genitals froth and are replete 

 with semen. 



The cock and the hen are especially fertile in the spring ; as 

 if the sun, or heaven, or nature, or the soul of the world, or the 

 omnipotent God for all these names signify the same thing 

 were a cause in generation superior and more divine than they ; 

 and thus it is that the sun and man, i.e. the sun through man 

 as the instrument, engender man. In the same way the pre- 

 server of all things, and the male among birds, give birth to the 

 egg, from whence the chick, the perfect bird, is made eternal 

 in its kind by the approach and recession of the god of day, 

 who, by the divine will and pleasure, or by fate, serves for the 

 generation of all that lives. 



Let us conclude, therefore, that the male, although a prior 

 and more excellent efficient than the female, is still no more 

 than an instrumental efficient, and that he, not less than the 

 female, must refer his fecundity or faculty of engendering as 

 received from the approaching sun; and, consequently, that 

 the skill and foresight, which are apparent in his work, are 

 not to be held as proceeding from him but from God ; inas- 

 much as the male in the act of kind neither uses counsel nor 

 understanding; neither does man engender the rational part 

 of his soul, but only the vegetative faculty ; which is not re- 

 garded as any principal or more divine faculty of the soul, but 

 one only of a lower order. 



Since, then, there is not less of skill and prescience mani- 

 fested in the structure of the chick than in the creation of man 

 and the universe at large, it is imperative even in the genera- 

 tion of man to admit an efficient cause, superior to, and more 

 excellent than man himself : otherwise the vegetative faculty, 

 or that part of the soul or living principle which fashions and 

 preserves a man, would have to be accounted far more excellent 

 and divine, and held to bear a closer resemblance to God than 

 the rational portion of the soul, whose excellence, nevertheless, 

 we extol over all the faculties of all animals, and esteem as 



